The reasons and rationales
Reader comment on item: Iraq's Weapons & The Road to War

Submitted by Sheerahkahn (United States), Jun 3, 2003 at 16:17

Mr. Pipes,

The world is a funny place, with all sorts of odd ideas of what is correct and what is wrong. Sometimes, truth gets turned on it's head, and down becomes up, left becomes right, wrong becomes correct, evil becomes holy, and lies become truth. Somewhere in all this morass of moral ambiguity lays the truth, buried in the shadows of obfuscation, hyperbole, and good intentions.
If the world cannot trust the US to discern this truth out of this moral morass, how can America's own citizens trust it's government to do so?
President Bush outright lied to the American public about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction because he didn't have the back-bone, or the mental capacity to articulate in a coherent manner the rationale that the United States has plenty of justification in Saddam's unwillingness to cooperate with the UN for us to take matters in our own hands.
Aside from the fact that the Europeans just plain lack any semblance of a spine, with france being the larger of the more obnoxious amoebas, Bush just didn't have the capacity, the will, the moral fortitude...who knows what limited his ability to convey America's disappointment with the UN's willingness to let a man who started a war, flaunt his disregard to international law and the cease-fire agreement.
Bush told a bald-face lie to the American public to elicit an expected, and desired, response of support. He wrongfully assumed that the only way he could've convinced us to go to war to remove Saddam was to emphasize Saddam's, as of right now, non-existant WMD's, and by saying that he had these weapons we, the US, was in iminent danger of attack.
Bush lied to the American public because he was afraid that we, the American public, did not understand that Saddam was, and in my opinion, still is, a threat to America's interest in the region. In short, President Bush had, and still has, no respect for the intelligence of the American people. If he had respect for us, he would've told the truth rather than lie and point to the moral evolution of the war as a way to distract us from the fact that he lied about the iminent danger of these, so far, non-existent WMD's.

In short, all Bush had to say to us was, "look people, this Saddam guy has not lived up to the cease-fire agreement he signed in 1991, has actively sought to undermine the US influence in the region through diplomatic terrorism, has openly sent funds to the families of suicide bombers eliciting a quid pro quo support of future suicide bomber's in Israel, has killed thousands if not hundreds of thousands of his own citizens...ladies and gentlemen of the United States, I emplore you to embrace the call for freedom of the Iraqi people from this dictator and bring closure to this international circus that has weighed us down for the past ten years."
No mention of WMD's, no need to peddle fear so that people are deathly afraid of loud sounds at night, just simply have stated the facts as they were, and allow us to say, "Mr. President, release the dogs of war!"

There were plenty of valid reasons to go to war none of which involved the issue of WMD's. Bush chose poorly, and now he must account for his decision to lie.

Sheerahkahn

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